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Baghdad, Mon Amour: Selected Writings of Salah Al Hamdani Book

Baghdad, Mon Amour: Selected Writings of Salah Al Hamdani
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  • Baghdad, Mon Amour: Selected Writings of Salah Al Hamdani
  • Written by author Salah Al Hamdani
  • Published by Northwestern University Press, April 2008
  • Baghdad, Mon Amour is a memoir by Salah Al Hamdani centered on his imprisonment under Saddam Hussein, his subsequent exile in France for more than thirty years, and his emotional return to Baghdad and seeing his family again after all those years w
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Baghdad, Mon Amour is a memoir by Salah Al Hamdani centered on his imprisonment under Saddam Hussein, his subsequent exile in France for more than thirty years, and his emotional return to Baghdad and seeing his family again after all those years with feelings of tremendous joy but also guilt for having “abandoned” them. The beauty of Al Hamdani’s prose and poetry is skillfully captured in Sonia Alland’s translation.

Salah Al Hamdani, poet and French actor from Iraq, was born in 1951 in Baghdad. He has lived in exile in France for the last thirty years. He started writing as a political prisoner in Iraq around the age of twenty. He is also the author of numerous works in both Arabic and French.

Sonia Alland lives in both New York City, where she is a longtime public school volunteer, and southern France. She has been translating the works of the French writer Marie Bronsard and has also participated in her husband’s anthropological research in both France and Catalonia, Spain.

"Sometimes, very rarely, a poet emerges from the depths of time, emblematic and enigmatic, to embody the horror and the beauty and the compassion and the prophetic clarity so unique to this craft of shaman, as dancer of the broken heart. Such a person is ageless. He is of the company of the ancient ones, the masters. Those who speak directly 'from my heart to your heart.' He speaks of the essential, of the human condition. And we are ashamed. And we weep. Such a man is Salah Al Hamdani. We recognize him. I wish to salute the thin, slightly clothed boy with the torn sandals, and over him an austere sky—from a country where too manychild soldiers are buried under the starred flag of the night. I honor the mature, keening exiled poet who now looks at a poor moon in the middle of the night, vibrating to the rhythms of the clouds. May he find peace."—Breyten Breytenbach

"In this selection of prose and poems, poet and actor Hamdani depicts his journey out of Iraq to exile in France and back to his birthplace some 30 years later. Between these two epochs, stories of struggle, loss, longing, and love evolve inextricably, written in a language charged with passion and high sentimentality...Recommended for large public and academic libraries."—Library Journal

"If any one poet can make a difference, it's someone like Al Hamdani...[he] is pure lightning."—Rattle Poetry Journal

"Salah Al Hamdani is a poet, but I don't think any of his poems can match the simple prose that tells the adventures at the border and the final reunion, after three decades with his mother."—RALPH Magazine

"Baghdad, Mon Amour is a fascinating, beautiful and wonderful book...it is a profound study in love, war and memory."—Morning Star, Great Britain

"Baghdad, Mon Amour is highly recommended to any who wants to understand an Iraqi's love for his homeland."—Midwest Book Review

"Al Hamdani's trip to Baghdad walks us into the politically complicated situation of Iraq and satisfies a desire to understand how being born in one country while living in another could establish a positive, even if initially painful, experience."—MultiCultural Review

"...[a] deeply personal, intensely human journey...Sonia Alland has done an amazing translation. To translate from one language to another is difficult, but to extend linguistic bridge from the Middle East by way of France and maintain the sensitivity and desolation of these poems is remarkable."—The Café Review


Sadiq Alkoriji - Library Journal

In this selection of prose and poems, poet and actor Hamdani depicts his journey out of Iraq to exile in France and back to his birthplace some 30 years later. Between these two epochs, stories of struggle, loss, longing, and love evolve inextricably, written in a language charged with passion and high sentimentality. During the years of exile and salvation from the tyrannical fist of the late Saddam Hussein, the author was anguished by his longing for his country as if he had "never left Baghdad." His journey back to Iraq after the fall of Hussein was a journey to a shattered and stolen place but nonetheless pregnant with hope: "Everything is made for man and for light's transparency/in spite of the trace left by days of tears and the imprint of tyranny." Like the prose, the poems center on the same nostalgic theme of the poet's yearning for his hometown. Recommended for large public and academic libraries.


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